The Theatre Question Amnesty Thread

The cast of Oliver! found out it was closing because they saw the ads on the tube. I imagine most of the time, the cast and crew are told first before they issue a press release

Assuming similar to real hair extensions you can pay for: women in other countries (mostly) selling their hair. Obviously there are a lot of ethical issues around suppliers etc etc

Related: do we know if a lot of wigs are real or synthetic? There’s a lot of progress in synthetic now so I imagine many use that now?

I think most wigs in theatre are made with real hair. Human hair stays in good condition and has a long "life" than synthetic hair, which is obviously important when the cast wear wigs almost every day. Plus, human hair is more versatile for styling as you can't curl or style synthetic wigs unless a theatre can afford to fork out for speciality heat-proof synthetic hair wigs.

Generally speaking, human hair wigs can last for up to a year (so essentially a full contract) whereas synthetic wigs only last between 4-6 months before needing replaced.

Not exactly wigs, but some false facial hair is made of yak hair. 

This may be compeltely wrong or have some element of truth but I believe they may be leftover from the days those theatres were owned by livenation and then when ATG purchased them, they kept the websites.

In The Play That Goes Wrong how to the various decorations stick to/fall off the wall at the right time?

I can answer this one, a few of my productions have been filmed.

The changes are all programmed in and the original show file stored, so they'd use the one as intended whenever possible (that is the true version after all). So the lighting desk has different versions of the show stored and they can easily switch between the two.

How do you mean lighting cues? The timing or what the lights do? The number of cues and when they happen wouldn't change (at least not in my experience), but the colour, brightness etc that those cues create may be altered.

I’m not sure if this has been asked before, but when watching The Inheritance from the front row I was wondering how they get a lot of the mobile phone cues to work. When a character on stage receives an alert on their phone it sounds like the alert is coming from the actual handset, and the screen even lights up with the correct user interface related to the alert. Is there a specific smartphone app that’s been developed for use on stage, where someone offstage can send alerts directly to the actors phone? The alerts come in so quickly I’m sure they can’t be being sent actual text messages, as even if there was a couple of seconds delay in them being received (which would be very likely in London theatres where phone signal is usually patchy) it would ruin the whole flow of the dialogue.

Apologies for the double post but I can do this one too, though this is based off pub chat not first hand experience.

A sound engineer at The National has developed the app, and only a select few have access (Apple said no, due to copyright or something). Can't for the life of me remember the name, theatrecaller or something like that. Anyway, you load the content onto the phone, this can be a ringtone and a video recording of an iPhone's call screen, could be a Facebook feed being scrolled throygg etc, then the phone is connected to a dedicated WiFi network. This content can then be triggered using Qlab (standard software for controlling sound and video on theatre shows) by sending a trigger message via WiFi using something called OSC that lets everything talk to each other. The apl has some neat features like you can tell the app that a bit of content is a phone call and so when the actor touches the phone screen it goes black and stops ringing so it looks like they've picked up. Operator has to watch carefully, as when the actor lifts the phone from their face they need to fire another cue so the screen lights up like the real deal.

It isn't 100% reliable though. Every sound cue on the phone has a back up coming from the nearest speaker so if the WiFi does drop out or phone gets confused or dropped etc then the operator fires the back up if the phone didn't work. It also glitches and turns the brightness way down so you can't see what is on the screen.

But having seen shows with it, when you go to a show without it it is very emersion breaking seeing blank screens or static fake plastic screens.

I do remember seeing notifications on the phones when I saw The Inheritance at the Young Vic.

I recently read the Les Mis-elephant was already in a skip, and he saw it and brought it back as an ornament for his garden. I thought that was brilliant!